Guild Wars 2

Going with their television show analogy, I’d cancel the “Scarlet Show” right now and put in a mid-season replacement. Perhaps “Gordon Ramsay’s Master Chef: Tyria.” We’d learn the recipe for a new food consumable every two weeks.

Atlas.9704:

Evolution of the Living Story

“Aside from the Living Story main characters, we’ll also be surprising you with interesting villains, one of whom will become your personal nemesis. "

In my opinion we’re still barely on that first part, but we haven’t even reached the second.

So if you want her to be your nemesis, have fun, but I’m waiting for a better one.

So she has not been confirmed to be our personal nemesis?
Your link is from almost a year ago (February of 2013) — are they ever going to get to the identity of this personal nemesis?

The bi-weekly content is not fun enough to re-play once people have their achievements done — that’s the real problem (IMO).

islarose.7356:

stormspirit.6598:

lordkrall.7241:

ThiBash.5634:

Yes. That’s actually fairly common business procedure: take your losses before things get worse.

It is extremely unusual that lets say a series suddenly decide to delete several months of work (and thus also putting it several months behind, which would mean literally several months of nothing released) just because some people dislike it.
As far as I remember right now it has actually never happened.

Just deleting stuff and leaving this storyline that they have been building on for almost a year hanging would most likely create way more issues than just going ahead with the plan.

Are you kidding? It happens constantly in entertainment. If a large enough part of the consumer base doesn’t like something, it’s changed… or removed entirely. That’s how it works. The last thing ANY business that’s run with a bit of sense would do is stick to it’s guns and shove something the customers hate into their faces.

The only question is, how wide spread is the Scarlet hate and whether or not a significant number of players have stepped away from the game over it.

Worth noting, we don’t know where the story is going, how it will tie in, or really anything regarding Anet’s plans for a character they’ve made quite an effort to include on a regular basis. The end result could redeem the complaints some of the players have. Maybe not, but let’s not promote this idea of scrapping all of the content to be left with months of nothing, and throw the baby out with the bathwater in our haste.

You’re saying that having bad content is better than no content at all. But this may not necessarily be the case:

If that bad content is actively turning people off of the game, it might be better to scrap it all. It depends on how much people dislike it.

Also, if they scrap what’s in development now, we’d get to see non-Scarlet content a bit earlier — that appeals to me personally.

On the other hand: Anet did create Scarlet so it’s likely if they scrapped her they’d create equally terrible Living Stories as replacements.

Skins for siege and more finishers are easy to implement and probably would be cash cows for Anet (especially considering how much siege is used every day).

Skins for towers and camps are a bit harder to implement because: who pays for them? The guild that claims? How would you do that — as guilds don’t own gems: players do. This would take a bit of work from Anet (though I think the idea of it is great).

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

What’s the armor increase? Ascended weaponry had significant increases in the damage stat of the weapon itself.

for heavy

helm – 127 vs 121
shoulder – 127 vs 121
coat – 381 vs 362
glove – 191 vs 182
pants – 254 vs 242
feet – 191 vs 182

that’s assuming the datamined wupwup ascended chat codes are accurate (which is questionable considering they have TPP stats rather than celestial (wupwup)

So the difference is 61 more points you can move to other stats (power, precision, etc). IMO small, but not insignificant.

61 is the increase in base armor value, nothing to do with stats. But again given that the chat codes are for wupwup but don’t have the stats related to wupwup I don’t personally hold much value in the stats or armor value being accurate.

But as I understand it, your armor value is Toughness + Defense. So with Ascended armor, your Defense is going up by 61, which means you can reduce your Toughness by that amount and move it to other stats.

As for the set being wupwup, the Defense stat shouldn’t be affected by the set type, only by whether the gear is heavy, medium or light.

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

What’s the armor increase? Ascended weaponry had significant increases in the damage stat of the weapon itself.

for heavy

helm – 127 vs 121
shoulder – 127 vs 121
coat – 381 vs 362
glove – 191 vs 182
pants – 254 vs 242
feet – 191 vs 182

that’s assuming the datamined wupwup ascended chat codes are accurate (which is questionable considering they have TPP stats rather than celestial (wupwup)

So the difference is 61 more points you can move to other stats (power, precision, etc). IMO small, but not insignificant.

People like to zerg, it’s low pressure (if you get wiped, you don’t feel it was personally your fault) but you still feel like you contributed (you did get the loot after all!).

So those servers that have big enough queues will zerg in the new map as well. Those servers that struggle to get maps filled will lose “regular” WvW population.

Besides, it’s still server A vs server B vs server C, right? So any population imbalance between the three servers will likely be mirrored in this new map.

Leamas.5803:

For the cost in gems, I would not buy it if the the stats were anything less that Journeyman, and would still not use it on any rares. At the current exchange rate, you can get 49g78s79c for your 800 gems. That can buy 324 master salvage kits. 36394 salvaged items which would cost 10g91s82c in salvage-o-matic fees. OR, 5657 basic salvage kits. 141425 salvaged items, which would cost 42g42s75c in fees to the salvage-o-matic. The salvage-o-matic just has too much math against it. Even if it were using master stats, it would still be expensive.

I believe, like the gathering tools, the brunt of the payoff is intended to be in the form of convenience.

Ashabhi.1365:

NinjaBreadMan.8926:

Ashabhi.1365:

Yargesh.4965:

It seems that people are saying ANET is lazy/incompetent because they would rather not re-write the entire game code while it is too hard to use a character slot to level up a preferred race. Am I missing something?

^^This

If you took the time to level a race to 80, don’t you think that you would have found you wanted something else long before 80?

Seriously…it seems to me that people are just wanting a race change because they don’t want to put the time and effort into starting a new character.

Now who’s lazy? It’s not like it takes forever to level a new character.

I hope they never implement race change.

You think I’m lazy because i don’t want to level the same class back to 80 that I did once before? You think I’m lazy for wanting to abandon the character I have over 2k+ hours on because I was unlucky enough not to see race specific abilities as important back in august 2012? You think I’m lazy because id rather keep the 2 legendaries I already have on my first elementalist rather than start it all over again?

I understand where you’re coming from, but I still don’t understand why you didn’t know you wanted a different race before level 80.

If it took months and months to level a character (as in some other games) then I could understand it, but I think changing one’s race to avoid re-leveling is like trying to get an “Instant 80.”

As you said yourself, you spent thousands of hours (and a lot of money) on this character. One would think you knew long before now that it was the “wrong” race for what you wanted.

It’s only an opinion, just like yours. Sometimes one needs to live with the choices they make and not depend on someone else to “fix it” for them.

So you’ve never changed your opinion about anything before?

If you turn on the rarity indicator option in the inventory, does it show as yellow?

I remember the devs saying that our “personal nemesis” was someone we had already met — I remember this as being before the introduction of Scarlet. Is she nevertheless our personal nemesis? Or do I recall this incorrectly?

This bug is now a feature for defending against people kicking you at the last moment to bring in guildies or sell your spot.

back to gw2lfg, I guess.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Gee, and I thought most people complained there was no story to miss out on!

Yup, there is no story to miss out on. So the OP’s concerns can be put to rest.

Just reset the personal story to zero when you do a race change. It’s as simple as that.
It’d be as if you didn’t bother to do the personal story until you reached level 80.
As for gear: everything gets transferred to the equivalent skin of your new race.

PraetorMortis.8610:

I’m not sure ascended armor has any value beyond being a carrot on a stick for OCD players who can’t do math. From what I’ve seen of it, it has NO infusion slots. It’s just regular armor but pink instead of orange.

For those worried about it in WvW: the shoulders, boots, and gloves are 35/25/25 vs the 34/24/24 of exotic gear. The coat is 106/75/75 compared to the 101/72/72 exotic. If a guy with less than +20 more to a stat can beat you, it’s not a gear issue. It looks like a full set of ascended armor will provide less power increase than a single stack of might.

If it’s a chore to get it, I don’t see the point. If it’s agony resist you need for future fractals, I believe they want you to craft infusions with the new drop items.

What’s the armor increase? Ascended weaponry had significant increases in the damage stat of the weapon itself.

ValeN.3129:

lordkrall.7241:

Funnily enough back during Prophecies people were complaining about how bad and disconnected that story was as well.

Have to agree here, gw’s CAMPAIGN story was never a strong point.

The problem is that Anet’s storytelling improved from Prophecies to Factions to Nightfall (I didn’t get EoTN). It was never great, and there were always major mistakes, but it did get better.

What we have now is a huge step backwards. That the Scarlet storyline passed all the way through the Anet chain-of-command and was approved at each step means Anet is incapable of creating and properly vetting storylines.

So not only are they bad at writing stories/characters, they can’t tell when those stories/characters are bad. Needless to say, this is very very bad.

I believe many servers run regular temple zergs. Just hope there’s one that runs during your play window.

Anyone else see stealth changes to boss behavior since the patch before the fractals one?

I’ve noticed that SEp1’s last boss Tazza has had her skill rotation modified. She has the same skills but no longer uses them in the same order as before (perhaps her greatsword 2 recharge has been reduced, causing this?). It also seems targeting priority has changed for her greatsword 5 skill.

It will definitely affect the health of the game — particularly in the desire of players to try new builds. Once someone has ascended gear, moving back to exotics is psychologically a step down. Who wants to feel like they’ve become less effective? This discourages people from trying new builds that require new gear.

The fewer new builds you try, the quicker you get bored, the quicker you get bored, the quicker you quit the game.

Panzerjaeger.7612:

I can almost let the attendance of all three Asuran colleges go because they stated that she only took part courses.

Been seeing this statement (about Scarlet just dabbling in courses) a lot on the forums. But the quote from the actual event (by Emissary Vorpp) is:

“Of course. I know of this Scarlet. She earned advanced engineering degrees at each of Rata Sum’s colleges in record time.”

If the devs subsequently said otherwise, they’re just trying to do damage control because everyone called her a Mary Sue.

Andrew.4506:

Horrible idea. Just god awful terrible. No.. how about they FIX it instead of leave it exactly in it’s current terrible form and just say “Hey, if you guys want to play some terrible content we’ll give you 100 gold.”

The point is that they are unwilling to do any real fix so asking for that is a waste of breath. This however, can be implemented in seconds so it has a nonzero possibility of being implemented — and players will at least get something positive out of the awful experience.

sixfootgeek.5470:

I see. Thanks for the quick replies guys. =D
Also, do you choose a server before creating a character, meaning all your characters will be on the same server?
Or is it that you can have a different character on different servers.
Mainly i ask this because i have a friends playing on an American server and friends playing on EU servers. So i’d like to play with them all =)

All your characters are on the same server. Note that you can transfer servers for a gem fee if you have characters in your account, or for free if you don’t have any characters (if you delete them all).

ThiBash.5634:

I wouldn’t mind if they skipped a release. They deserve a break after all we’ve been throwing at them.

I wouldn’t mind if they skipped a release. We deserve a break after all the Scarlet they’ve been throwing at us.

So everyone hates the Dredge fractal. Most people want it to be shortened. However, it doesn’t seem like Anet has the time (or wants to spend the time/effort) to shorten it.

So an alternate “fix” would be to increase the rewards for this fractal. All Anet would have to do is adjust a couple numbers to implement this.

So what’s your price? How much of a gold reward would you need before you’d be ok with getting the Dredge fractal? (Of course, you can give different gold values for different fractal tiers.)

Lopez.7369:

I am questioning how much faster it would be, though. A lot of the mechanics in higher-level fractals are very unfriendly to the theoretical berserker melee train.

If they are moving towards punishing zerker gear (or making it far less effective), I wonder whether this will backfire on them with respect to Ascended gear:

Considering how much of a pain it is to craft Ascended weaponary (and armor in the future), a large percentage of people will likely craft one set of gear and use it everywhere, regardless of its effectiveness. Even if Anet pushes people towards using different types of gear, I’d guess that many will not want to grind out alternate sets of Ascended gear (and forget about Exotics: once you have Ascended, you feel, psychologically, Exotics are a step down).

Tremain.4623:

Lanfairya.9724:

Tremain.4623:

I don’t understand the Scarlet hate. She is no worse than treahern or kormir or shiro or rurik. People act like she is ruining some incredible story, newflash: it already sucked just as bad before. This ain’t lord of the ring folks.

Just because GW1 story sucked doesn’t mean that this has to suck and why shouldn’t I expect improvement? I would think that they would have learned something from making their first game. That is a terrible excuse. I do think, that we should ask for Lord of the Rings. There are games out there with incredible story lines: Arcanum, Homeworld, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger anyone? We should be asking for those stories, that level of writing. Even given a bad background from GW1 it was probably still salvageable. Then they just decided to throw in Scarlet a Saturday morning cartoon character who is responsible for EVERYTHING. At risk of given Angel anymore terrible ideas: In the next patch, we’ll learn she has a time machine and is actually responsible for the elder dragons. No! She is an Elder Dragon! She’s the legendary dragonborn that devours the others and becomes ULTRA, UBER, MEGA ELDER DRAGON! Seriously, I wouldn’t bat an eye if this happens because that’s how ridiculous the story is becoming.

So after 10 straight years of sucky stories you expect something good, that seems a bit unrealistic.

No, after 10 straight years of sucky stories, we expect a story that sucks on the same level as the others, not one that sucks much, much more.

Considering what they did to Halloween, I’d rather see Wintersday exactly the same as last year than suffer the bad changes that they inevitably will make.

All PvE content goes faster with zerker gear if you have a party that knows what its doing.

The nature of stat scaling means power, precision, critical damage interact better with each other (damagewise) than other stat combinations. The way bosses are designed (slow attacks with big damage) means armor is unnecessary as long as you know how to use dodges, evades, blocks, etc. properly.

Adine.2184:

Xemnas.3924:

Adine.2184:

you get at minimum 3 rares and 1 G for a teq kill so its worth it to me . I personally have to guest to another server cause mine doesn’t do it unfortunately which I’m fine with to be honest cause ive met a lot of cool people on the other server that i never would of come across otherwise .

which server are you on and which do you guest to?

Im on NSP and guest to SBI .

NSP goes for Tequatl every Thursday shortly after reset (I believe) .. check out www.northernshiverpeaks.org for more specific details.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Ya you really have to check with people in the zerg cuz on my server we don’t usually do bandit unless someone really needs the vista there. On my server it’s troll > oak > spider > boar and wasp if it spawns.

Is there a reason for this? Bandit is so close to troll. Plus, it just means more waiting time at boar since (even if you do Bandit) you have to wait for the boar event to be up for activation.

AKGeo.6048:

ThiBash.5634:

AKGeo.6048:

It’s a viable theory, and supports my earlier Guru-hosted assertion that Kiel isn’t as good as she seems. Especially since she immediately went away from her do-gooder pillar of justice character when she won the election, what with her numerous “slips” of the tongue in the fractal story mode dialogues. She maneuvered her way into power by playing the good guy so the players would like her. But I think she’s got a lot going on behind the scenes.

That would be fun…but I fear such a storyline is too complex for Anet…remember back when Jubilee was about to be released, and we all said: “the watchknights getting out of control is too obvious, so at least we know THAT won’t happen”?

That’s the thing with complex storylines: you don’t really see them coming until it’s too late.

The obvious things you see happening could very well just be a red herring. Simple facepalm obvious stuff that is taking center stage to distract you from the truly devious behind the scenes?

An advantage to this is that you can progress your ruse pretty easily while taking your time with the truly juicy stuff.

That or I’m just being really hopeful. Sue me.

And the NPCs whom we’ve met but don’t display any recognition towards us have had their memory wiped in a nefarious plot to confuse and disorient us — so that whoever is behind all this can swoop in and attack at the optimal moment of weakness.

Or: Anet is just making it up as they go, not bothering sufficiently with the details.

gamemaster.7154:

GW1 writing.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxmkAoLC6_4

The tragic thing is that Anet didn’t learn from this and we got Traherne.

But Scarlet is on a whole different level of bad — “embarrassing” is probably a good description.

What makes everyone think that an actual expansion would be better than what we’ve got?

Looking at the Living Story, I feel that Anet is currently incapable of telling a good story with well-developed characters. And this is the root of many of GW2’s problems.

An expansion into Cantha or Elona would probably be just as bad, except the setting is Cantha/Elona instead of Tyria.

At this moment in time, I’d actually prefer a well done Living Story than Cantha/Elona as I feel there are yet lots of interesting stories to be told in the world we have right now.

If you don’t find the content compelling enough to do, don’t force yourself to do it just for the achievement points. It’s better for you and it’s better for Anet because you won’t mistakenly get counted in their metrics as someone who loves the content.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Jeenks.1348:

Thanks. Awesome signature, it made me laugh.

Thanks. To expand the order in Queensdale goes like this:

boar>troll>bandit>oak>spider (sometimes wasp) wash and repeat.

The ordering can be slightly different on different servers. On my server we do:

boar, oak, troll, bandit, spider (and sometimes wasp afterwords).

Just ask, people don’t mind.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Like any bad series.. just cancel it. Cancel it now, before the the writer comes up with extraterrestrial birth or radioactive spider bites to explain Scarletpowerz.

It is damage control time. Tyrian Lore has suffered enough.

This. Anet should learn from the TV networks in this case and just cut their losses.

So you need so much AR just to get through level 40’s instability that AR becomes a non-factor for 41-49. That does seem to be a design mistake.

DaShi.1368:

Jink Bonestealer.9274:

Plagiarised.2865:

I just want to reiterate: Scarlet was not the cause of the meltdown. We learn that the facility was initially intended to study chaos magic but the Inquest pushed the direction of the facility towards dragon magic. The Inquest learned that there was a link between the Elder Dragon energy and chaos energy. They concluded that the chaos energy and dragon magic may have a link or even be the same. They also concluded that this magical energy follows a course through the globe and crisscrosses at certain areas. One of these areas was the Thaumanova Reactor. So their study of the two energies at this interception of magical energy is what caused the meltdown.

Which is what makes her insertion into the fractal story even more pointless, in my opinion.

It doesn’t if it give us some more information about what she is doing. This actually is good writing because it is showing something rather than telling it. Sadly, many of the complaints about Scarlet are that people want to be told what is going on. Hopefully, they will realize how much better this is after we’ve reached the end of the Scarlet story arc. Then it should all come together and we would be like, “Ah, so that’s why Scarlet was there.” If not, then you might have some claim to the story being poorly written.

If the first 10 minutes of a TV show are just awful you flip the channel and watch something else — you don’t wait around for the off chance that it’ll have an awesome ending.

DaShi.1368:

Is there a reward when someone posts the one thousandth thread about Scarlet?

If so, can they be original or must they be something people have already made threads about several times before?

There is no such reward — and yet there are about that many threads. Anet: this is how much your customers dislike your storytelling.

On topic: if Halloween was any indication, there will be no Scarlet in Wintersday (for 2 weeks). But be prepared to trade thousands upon thousands of ugly wool sweaters for whatever items that come out.

If we had chosen the Abaddon fractal, we would have gotten Scarlet as the force behind the fall of Abaddon.

However, the election was extremely biased towards Kiel:

• Kiel is human, most players identify with humans.
• WP cost reduction appeals to far more people.
• The Thumanova reactor is known to almost all GW2 players while Abaddon is pretty much known only to those who played GW1.
• Kiel was introduced as a good character, while Evon, as a bad one.

…and there was practically no chance Evon would have won anyway.

At least at the moment some people who use less than optimal armor/gear can be convinced to change.

Once Ascended armor comes, those who choose not to craft Ascended zerker gear will likely never change their gear again — so the DPS problem is only going to get worse.

Jerron Blacksilver.8629:

I’m to the point that I only play the new LS content to get the achievements, then I go back to doing things that are fun and have no tedious and annoying Mary Sue megavillain behind (or at least involved in) everything bad that happens.

I’m at the point where I simply ignore the LS altogether. Imagine my surprise when I got the achievement reward (place of power) for one of the recent LS achievement lines! (I’m guessing from killing corrupted champs while champ training.)

Scarlet is a terribly written character and the Living Stories have been terribly written. However, I doubt getting rid of Scarlet is not going to solve the problem.

The Scarlet plotline no doubt had to pass many peoples’ approvals — and the fact that it did pass means that Anet does not have the ability/good taste to properly vet storylines.

So even if Scarlet were removed from the game, her replacement would likely be another terrible storyline with terrible characterizations.

morrolan.9608:

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Hey, everyone. We’ve been reading all your feedback about the Flamekissed Armor Skin that was released into the Gem Store yesterday.

Although the Flamekissed Armor uses the same mesh as the Tier 3 Human Cultural Armor, it was not our intention to create an armor skin that so closely matched the existing Tier 3 Human Cultural armor set. The intention was to use the mesh as a basis for creating an armor set that stands apart and is distinct in appearance. However, after reading your feedback, we agree that the Flamekissed armor is not visually distinct enough from Human Cultural Tier 3 armor.

Sorry but I find it incredible that no-one who reviewed the armor prior to release didn’t twig to the fact that it was exactly the same plus with added fire effects. That beggars belief I’m afraid.

This. Which means they did know what they were doing and just didn’t expect the uproar that would ensue.

KOPPER.1458:

“The best rewards should go to the bottom teams, to boost them!”

This sounds like my nephews Tee ball games where they don’t keep score because everyone is a winner… rofl

“2. Give the server the prize pool, and give each player with a key a share of the pool, So for example. BG: 1000G, split among 10k players, Mag, 850g, split among 300 players. (Totally made up numbers)”’

What is with “reward the bottom servers?”

Because every person knows that the “winners” are winners only because of coverage and to reward them would only encourage people stack even more to those servers.

Presumably your nephew’s T-ball games involve teams of equal size, in which case (IMO) they should be keeping score.

ThiBash.5634:

You’re overreacting. Not every rune works well on every profession. You don’t see me crying over the Soldier rune not affecting attunement swaps do you? Or yelling at Anet that I don’t have poison to make use of sigils that increase poison duration?

And you can still make much better use out of stuff like Rune of Altruism than many other professions.

I think the complaint is that the Engineer is the only profession that is excluded from this rune. And that Anet could easily have had it proc on both signet use and elixirs — making it potentially useful for all professions — but didn’t (almost certainly because they didn’t bother to remember that Engies don’t have signets).

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Ahh this is why I don’t envy anet’s devs sometimes. People love the original, they change it, then others love the new version, they change it back… Bah it’s just a cluster kitty if you ask me.
But I’m really sorry it sucks for you I’d be sad if they ruined my t3 too, but I’d be really happy if they gave us a 4th dye slot in the goggles…. Lola

Anet brought it upon themselves: they shouldn’t have changed it in the first place.

People spend lots of gold/effort to obtain the looks they want. It’s pretty clear that if you make a change, you will upset some/many people — particularly since this game is supposed to be all about looks.

If Anet wanted to change armor looks, they should have come up with a different armor set (or maybe just alternate version of the changed set).